The Father's Day Escape (Bandido)

Father's Day comes at a strange time because it comes right around the same weekend as my anniversary (June 18 - nine glorious years!) and my daughter's birthday (June 20 - seven years old this year!). It feels relatively unimportant compared to these days. This year it was even more so because we had my parents and grandparents over Sunday morning for donuts and coffee to celebrate Ardyn's birthday (we had my wife's family over on her actual birthday).

Well, all of this build up to say that my wife did not forget about me! I got some basketball socks, french fry seasoning, chocolate, a key chain made by my kids, and a pocket-sized gem of a game - Bandido! It was only two days before when we were walking around Indigo and I pointed out this game to her saying that it would be the perfect little stocking stuffer or something. She told me later that she had needed one more little thing for my gifts and was going to give up on finding something and just give me some cash to buy what I wanted. When I told her about this game, she went back and picked it up the next day!

Don't let the size of this game fool you - it is HARD! I've only played is solo thus far and I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be if I had to talk to others to plan out my moves. Basically you start out with the prison card with five escape tunnels (or six if you're crazy enough to make it more difficult). You have three cards in your hand with different tunnels on them and you play them from your hand, connecting the to existing tunnels. Your objective is to block all the tunnels so the escaped prisoner cannot get away. 

This sounds simple, but it ain't! You have very few cards that actually block the tunnels and you have to plan out how you can use the block cards you do have to block multiple tunnels. You also need to try and converge multiple tunnels into each other so they block each other off. If you can't block his tunnel before you've played all the cards in the deck, you lose. Alternately, if you place the cards in a way that there is a tunnel that you will not be able to block, you lose.

Here I am losing - the bandido escapes. I had about six of these before I won.

Here I am with a quick win. These only happen if you're lucky.

Finally starting to build some strategy and the result was this hard fought win.

I don't currently own any pocket-sized solo games that I can bring with me anywhere - well, now I do! Obviously it's not going to have the depth of a bigger game, but it's nice to play a few quick games and feel totally inadequate when you lose every one! Ok, not quite. I think I won three out of the ten games that I've played so far. All in all, the perfect little game for Father's Day!